Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include an announcement Thursday from President Donald Trump that tariffs on goods from Mexico that fall under a North American trade pact signed during his first term in office have been paused until April 2.
When Tiffany Ellis started making her own cold-pressed juices, it was mostly an attempt to get her picky son to eat vegetables. Now, it’s turned into a business, one that she was able to fall back on a few months ago when she lost her job managing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for Amazon.
But tariffs are making her already difficult evolution into a full-time entrepreneur even harder.
“It is compounding an already stressful transition,” Ellis, founder of Decatur-based juice company G Ann’s Cold Pressed, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I’m thinking about what this might look like six months from now or even a year from now.”
She’s not alone. Experts say tariffs and the general uncertainty around President Donald Trump’s economic policies have small business owners trying to plan for a future they can’t forecast.
This week, Trump implemented planned tariffs on key U.S. trading partners. Tariffs are taxes on imported goods, and economists consider them inflationary. Those taxes typically are passed along by businesses to the buyers of products, whether the buyers are manufacturers obtaining parts that go into other things or a consumer shopping at a store or online.
After postponing them for a month, Trump on Tuesday slapped goods coming from Canada and Mexico with 25% import taxes, while taxing energy imports from Canada at 10%. He also added another 10% tariff on goods from China on top of across-the-board 10% tariffs on Chinese goods the U.S. levied last month.
China retaliated last month with levies on agricultural and other heavy equipment and vehicles. On Tuesday, China said it would put more tariffs in place.
Trump has also said he would slap “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries on April 2 to match their tariffs, taxes and subsidies.
By Wednesday afternoon, Trump had walked back some tariffs, granting a one-month extension for U.S. automakers on tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada.
On Thursday morning, Trump announced that after speaking with the Mexican president, he agreed that anything that falls under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade deal negotiated during his first term, will be exempt from tariffs until April 2.
For Ellis, everything from the cost of the bottles she uses for her juices to the ingredients she sources is fluctuating. While the price of produce changed before Trump came into office, it was mostly dictated by what was in season, Ellis said. Now, prices are changing week by week.
“With cucumbers, one week they might be $21, then the next week they could be $25 a case … and then the next week it could be $18,” Ellis said. She has had to slightly raise the prices of her juice shot bundles because of the cost increases.
Trump administration officials have sent mixed messages on how long the tariffs against Canada and Mexico could be in place. It’s also unclear whether the other tariffs he’s talked about will actually be implemented.
The lack of clarity and Trump’s other policies, like those targeting DEI initiatives, are creating an uncertain environment for some business owners. Lakeysha Hallmon, CEO and founder of the Village Market, a Black entrepreneur support organization, said the uncertainty has caused a lot of anxiety for business owners. Her companies help about 400 entrepreneurs across the U.S.
“I think small business owners are just holding their breath … hoping for the best-case scenario while understanding that it could be the worst-case scenario,” Hallmon said.
As an entrepreneur herself, Hallmon is carefully looking at every line item of her businesses’ finances right now, “ensuring that my companies have the financial runway to continue to, you know, survive during this time with so much uncertainty ahead of us.”
For other entrepreneurs, they’re trying to get around the economic confusion by getting around the tariffs altogether, experts say.
In the wake of the import taxes Trump put on China during his first administration, the volume of imports from China decreased. But that didn’t mean sales decreased for Chinese companies. Instead, brands just moved supply chains from their current suppliers to a different location, said Rodney Manzo, founder of supply chain software company Anvyl.
“You had kind of a shell game,” Manzo said. “Manufacturers in China would move production into Taiwan, Vietnam, other locations. They are still Chinese companies, but they’re producing in other locations.”
This time around, entrepreneurs are still taking that approach, he said, but also being creative with developing different entities “and having freight forwarders and others do things for them to kind of skirt the taxes.”
For Ellis, if tariffs continue and the price of produce keeps increasing, she will have to pull back on other things to try to keep her juices affordable for customers.
“As much as I can I’m going to continue to find ways to cut costs for my customer. So, if it means scaling back on some of our, you know, branding, maybe reducing some of what we do with our packaging, whatever we can do to make it more cost efficient, that’s going to be the goal,” Ellis said. “I don’t want to diminish the quality of the product.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Report for America are partnering to add more journalists to cover topics important to our community. Please help us fund this important work here.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
